Jeremiah 16:9-13 – Rest Elsewhere.
9 For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: “Behold, I will cause to cease from this place, before your eyes and in your days, the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride.
10 “And it shall be, when you show this people all these words, and they say to you, ‘Why has the Lord pronounced all this great disaster against us? Or what is our iniquity? Or what is our sin that we have committed against the Lord our God?’ 11 then you shall say to them, ‘Because your fathers have forsaken Me,’ says the Lord; ‘they have walked after other gods and have served them and worshiped them, and have forsaken Me and not kept My law. 12 And you have done worse than your fathers, for behold, each one follows the dictates of his own evil heart, so that no one listens to Me. 13 Therefore I will cast you out of this land into a land that you do not know, neither you nor your fathers; and there you shall serve other gods day and night, where I will not show you favor.’
“Nations, in general," reflects John Dickinson in The Creation of the American Republic by Gordon S. Wood, "are not apt to think until they feel. “
Perhaps a similar recognition of the reality of blowback is why the Lord instructs His prophet in Jeremiah 16:9-13 not to seek rest, repose, and reflection among the people he warns. He wired Jeremiah as a sensitive soul, an instrument He moves delicately He has been in the process since Jeremiah 1 and affirmed as recently as Jeremiah 15 of hardening Jeremiah's resolve, of lowering his expectations of the immediate results he will see. Meanwhile, though, He pre-plans for His prophet's easily entangled emotions by insisting on the discipline of submission to His Word.
God recognizes what Dickinson does, and perhaps what Jeremiah could easily forget as hope for human acceptance springs nearly eternal. The culture of disbelief around Jeremiah has taken years to ferment to this state. Given this, real, widespread repentance rarely happens instantly. Thus, the same God Who gave His Word THROUGH Jeremiah is giving it TO Jeremiah, reminding him that his renewal is in God rather than measurable results or instant human community.
Jeremiah's people must feel before they think, if they, by God's grace, are ever to think rightly at all concerning their sin. God even gives the script on which they ruminate, into which Jeremiah will be absorbed if he crosses the threshold of the culture's houses hoping to see evidence of gladness in God. You will look for marriage, He seems to be telling Jeremiah by way of warning.
The Expert Judges of the health and hope of cultures, God knows marriage is the human covenant of resilience toward the future, the one Moses's parents enter into by the faith He will commend in Hebrews 11. Jesus uses the tendency to marry and be given in marriage as a sign that people continued to have hope for the future right up until the flood, and He honors it Himself with His first miracle. The culture you are contending with, God seems to tell Jeremiah is so sick and so under the finality of judgment that you are not going to hear people marrying and being given in marriage there. Don't hope for it. Don't go looking for it.
So what WILL the people be consoling themselves with in place of marriage, which the New Testament reveals to be at least a shadowy picture of Christ and the Church? God Who knows all hearts reveals this to His prophet and to us, lest we endanger our peace by crossing the threshold in the culture and expecting rest and results there.
Burdened and besieged, God shows that this people will use their energy to argue against His justice. They will use the remaining words, and time, and space He grants to try to justify themselves. Not guilty, they will huff. Next!
Before Jeremiah goes door-to-door expecting, metaphorically, the blood of the lamb on the door proclaiming, confessing an absolute need for atonement and a forsaking of one's own righteousness, God re-centers him on how He sees this people. Their forsaking of God shows in the habits they walk after, the ones Jeremiah has been inveighing against for the duration of his book, and this is just the tip of evil's iceberg. They are worse than the sinners they came from, weighs God, because they go astray with stubborn individuality. They won't listen. They are deep in judgment.
God would have his prophets, then and now, maintain a sense of spiritual separation. Our hope is in Him rather than in an instant community of shallow emotional reactions to a combination of circumstantial relief and convenient latching onto His Word.
Unlike Jeremiah, we have no specific proclamation against eating with sinners. We have, instead, Christ's example of doing just that. But remember, brothers and sisters, in following Christ across the culture's thresholds, we follow One Who, unlike us, wasn't easily fooled, didn't mistake false optimism for the bedrock of real hope. HE needed no man to tell Him about men's hearts because He knew them already.
So, go to the weddings and rejoice at whatever points to Christ there. Marvel that God's grace SO overflows from generation to generation that we can go into lost people's homes and agree with Christ that even they, being evil, know how to be good parents. But, in keeping with the caution of Jeremiah 6:9-13, go aware. Go aware that we do not find, will not find, our truest, deepest fellowship there.
Go aware that we have been preordained to be aliens and strangers here whose real home is in a city built not with hands, whose truest fellowship is reserved for Christ Whom we will one day know as we are known, and secondarily for His elect with whom we will reign.
10 “And it shall be, when you show this people all these words, and they say to you, ‘Why has the Lord pronounced all this great disaster against us? Or what is our iniquity? Or what is our sin that we have committed against the Lord our God?’ 11 then you shall say to them, ‘Because your fathers have forsaken Me,’ says the Lord; ‘they have walked after other gods and have served them and worshiped them, and have forsaken Me and not kept My law. 12 And you have done worse than your fathers, for behold, each one follows the dictates of his own evil heart, so that no one listens to Me. 13 Therefore I will cast you out of this land into a land that you do not know, neither you nor your fathers; and there you shall serve other gods day and night, where I will not show you favor.’
“Nations, in general," reflects John Dickinson in The Creation of the American Republic by Gordon S. Wood, "are not apt to think until they feel. “
Perhaps a similar recognition of the reality of blowback is why the Lord instructs His prophet in Jeremiah 16:9-13 not to seek rest, repose, and reflection among the people he warns. He wired Jeremiah as a sensitive soul, an instrument He moves delicately He has been in the process since Jeremiah 1 and affirmed as recently as Jeremiah 15 of hardening Jeremiah's resolve, of lowering his expectations of the immediate results he will see. Meanwhile, though, He pre-plans for His prophet's easily entangled emotions by insisting on the discipline of submission to His Word.
God recognizes what Dickinson does, and perhaps what Jeremiah could easily forget as hope for human acceptance springs nearly eternal. The culture of disbelief around Jeremiah has taken years to ferment to this state. Given this, real, widespread repentance rarely happens instantly. Thus, the same God Who gave His Word THROUGH Jeremiah is giving it TO Jeremiah, reminding him that his renewal is in God rather than measurable results or instant human community.
Jeremiah's people must feel before they think, if they, by God's grace, are ever to think rightly at all concerning their sin. God even gives the script on which they ruminate, into which Jeremiah will be absorbed if he crosses the threshold of the culture's houses hoping to see evidence of gladness in God. You will look for marriage, He seems to be telling Jeremiah by way of warning.
The Expert Judges of the health and hope of cultures, God knows marriage is the human covenant of resilience toward the future, the one Moses's parents enter into by the faith He will commend in Hebrews 11. Jesus uses the tendency to marry and be given in marriage as a sign that people continued to have hope for the future right up until the flood, and He honors it Himself with His first miracle. The culture you are contending with, God seems to tell Jeremiah is so sick and so under the finality of judgment that you are not going to hear people marrying and being given in marriage there. Don't hope for it. Don't go looking for it.
So what WILL the people be consoling themselves with in place of marriage, which the New Testament reveals to be at least a shadowy picture of Christ and the Church? God Who knows all hearts reveals this to His prophet and to us, lest we endanger our peace by crossing the threshold in the culture and expecting rest and results there.
Burdened and besieged, God shows that this people will use their energy to argue against His justice. They will use the remaining words, and time, and space He grants to try to justify themselves. Not guilty, they will huff. Next!
Before Jeremiah goes door-to-door expecting, metaphorically, the blood of the lamb on the door proclaiming, confessing an absolute need for atonement and a forsaking of one's own righteousness, God re-centers him on how He sees this people. Their forsaking of God shows in the habits they walk after, the ones Jeremiah has been inveighing against for the duration of his book, and this is just the tip of evil's iceberg. They are worse than the sinners they came from, weighs God, because they go astray with stubborn individuality. They won't listen. They are deep in judgment.
God would have his prophets, then and now, maintain a sense of spiritual separation. Our hope is in Him rather than in an instant community of shallow emotional reactions to a combination of circumstantial relief and convenient latching onto His Word.
Unlike Jeremiah, we have no specific proclamation against eating with sinners. We have, instead, Christ's example of doing just that. But remember, brothers and sisters, in following Christ across the culture's thresholds, we follow One Who, unlike us, wasn't easily fooled, didn't mistake false optimism for the bedrock of real hope. HE needed no man to tell Him about men's hearts because He knew them already.
So, go to the weddings and rejoice at whatever points to Christ there. Marvel that God's grace SO overflows from generation to generation that we can go into lost people's homes and agree with Christ that even they, being evil, know how to be good parents. But, in keeping with the caution of Jeremiah 6:9-13, go aware. Go aware that we do not find, will not find, our truest, deepest fellowship there.
Go aware that we have been preordained to be aliens and strangers here whose real home is in a city built not with hands, whose truest fellowship is reserved for Christ Whom we will one day know as we are known, and secondarily for His elect with whom we will reign.
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